Seeing causings and hearing gestures

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 236, 2009, Pages 405-428

  Butterfill, S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 75949119897     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: 14679213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2008.585.x     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. A. Michotte, The Perception of Causality, tr. T. Miles (London: Methuen, 1946), pp. 270-1
2. D.M. Armstrong, 'Going through the Open Door Again', in J. Collins et al. (eds), Causation and Counterfactuals (MIT Press, 2004), pp. 445-58
3. P.F. Strawson, 'Causation and Explanation', in his Analysis and Metaphysics (Oxford UP, 1992), p. 118
4. B.J. Scholl and P.D. Tremoulet, 'Perceptual Causality and Animacy', Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2000), pp. 299-309, at p. 299
5. D. Marr, Vision: a Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982), p. 35
6. A video is available on Brian Scholl's website, http://pantheon.yale.edu/ ∼bs265/ demos/causality.html. The figure is from G. Thines, A. Costall and G. Butterworth (eds), Michotte's Experimental Psychology of Perception (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1991), p. 69
7. P. White and E. Milne, 'Impressions of Enforced Disintegration and Bursting in the Visual Perception of Collision Events', Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128 (1999), pp. 499-516
8. and 'Phenomenal Causality: Impressions of Pulling in the Visual Perception of Objects in Motion', American Journal of Psychology, no (1997), pp. 573-602
9. The illustration is from Scholl and Tremoulet, 'Perceptual Causality and Animacy', p. 301
10. G.E.M. Anscombe, 'Causality and Determination', in E. Sosa and M. Tooley (eds), Causation (Oxford UP, 1993), pp. 88-104
11. C.J. Ducasse, 'Causation: Perceivable? Or Only Inferred?', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 26 (1965), pp. 173-9
12. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, pp. 109-32
13. F. Heider and M. Simmel, 'An Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour', American Journal of Psychology, 57 (1944), pp. 243-9, figure at p. 244. At the time of writing there is a reconstruction of Heider and Simmel's animation online at http://anthropomorphism.org/ img/Heider-Flash.swf
14. J.R. Searle, Intentionality: an Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge UP, 1983), pp. 114-15
15. S. Siegel, 'The Visual Experience of Causation', The Philosophical Quarterly, 59 (2009) (this issue), pp. 519-40
16. B.J. Scholl and K. Nakayama, 'Causal Capture: Contextual Effects on the Perception of Collision Events', Psychological Science, 13 (2002), pp. 493-8
17. A video is available on Scholl's web site referred to in fn. 6 above
18. Scholl and Nakayama, 'Illusory Causal Crescents: Misperceived Spatial Relations Due to Perceived Causality', Perception, 33 (2004), pp. 455-69, at p. 458
19. Cf. Scholl and Nakayama, p. 467: 'the perception of causality can also affect other types of visual processing - in this case the perception of spatial relations among moving objects'
20. Michotte, The Perception of Causality, p. 115, part of table IX
21. What does 'intended' mean here? It is used to indicate that what are perceived are motor commands which produce gestures rather than gestures themselves. See A.M. Liberman and I.G. Mattingly, 'The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised', Cognition, 21 (1985), pp. 1-36, at p. 23: 'gestures do have characteristic invariant properties ... though these must be seen, not as peripheral movements, but as the more remote structures that control the movements. These structures correspond to the speaker's intentions.'
22. So far these 'remote structures' are hypothetical: see A.M. Liberman and D.H. Whalen, 'On the Relation of Speech to Language', Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2000), pp. 187-96, at p. 195
23. A review of objections and some recent supporting evidence can be found in S. Pinker and R. Jackendoff, 'The Faculty of Language: What's Special About It?', Cognition, 95 (2005), pp. 201-36, §2.2
24. Liberman and Mattingly themselves emphasize that arguments for the theory are not conclusive and further research is needed: Liberman and Mattingly, 'A Specialization for Speech Perception', Science, 243 (1989), pp. 489-94, at p. 493
25. Ba-da-ga, from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/psychology/rmk/T2/T2.2b.html
26. S. Harnad, 'Psychophysical and Cognitive Aspects of Categorical Perception: a Critical Overview', in S. Harnad (ed.), Categorical Perception: the Groundwork of Cognition (Cambridge UP, 1987), pp. 1-28
27. See Liberman and Mattingly, 'The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised', pp. 20-1
28. B.H. Repp and A.M. Liberman, 'Phonetic Category Boundaries Are Flexible', in Harnad (ed.), Categorical Perception, pp. 89-112
29. L.C. Nygaard and D.B. Pisoni, 'Speech Perception: New Directions in Research and Theory', in J. Miller et al. (eds), Speech, Language and Communication (London: Academic Press, 1995), pp.72-5
30. Liberman and Mattingly, 'The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised', pp. 14-15
31. Constancy in speech perception is a complex phenomenon; we should be wary of assuming that speech perception exhibits constancy in just the sense in which colour perception does. For one thing, changes in how phones are produced can increase the amount of cognitive effort required to comprehend speech and can hinder or facilitate learning in different situations: Nygaard and Pisoni, 'Speech Perception', pp. 69ff. Constancy in speech perception may sometimes rely on limited cognitive resources such as attention and working memory
32. See Harnad (ed.), Categorical Perception. There is controversy over exactly how categorical perception should be defined (see B. Schouten et al., 'The End of Categorical Perception as We Know It', Speech Communication, 41 (2003), pp. 71-80), and even on whether speech perception is categorical (e.g., D.W. Massaro and M.M. Cohen, 'Categorical or Continuous Speech Perception: a New Test', Speech Communication, 2 (1983), pp. 15-35). It would be a major undertaking to give a rigorous, plausible and useful characterization of the phenomenon; the present rough characterization (like that of Schouten et al.) is inadequate because it refers to discriminability of stimuli outright rather than to discriminability by means of a particular perceptual modality
33. See Nygaard and Pisoni, 'Speech Perception', pp. 83-4, for a compact summary
34. F. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 166-7
35. J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn, 'How Direct Is Visual Perception? Some Reflections on Gibson's "Ecological Approach"', Cognition, 9 (1981), pp. 139-96, at p. 176
36. M. Matthen, Seeing, Doing and Knowing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)
37. Redrawn from Michotte, The Perception of Causality, p. 93, table IV
38. Saxe and Carey treat such findings as showing that subjects make judgements about whether an object is animate or inanimate: R. Saxe and S. Carey, 'The Perception of Causality in Infancy', Acta Psychologica, 123 (2006), pp. 144-65. Michotte, by contrast, argues (p. 68) that the effect is due to disrupting polarity, that is, disrupting the appearance of the first object approaching the second or the second object moving away from the first. Here I am supposing that Michotte is right to understand the effect as narrowly perceptual rather than as depending on judgements
39. See the contrast between 'dumbbell' and 'removal' conditions in Hoon Choi and B.J. Scholl, 'Effects of Grouping and Attention on the Perception of Causality', Perception and Psychophysics, 66 (2004), pp. 926-42, at p. 930
40. White and Milne (p. 512) cautiously advance the possibility that causal perception is categorical, noting that the experiments they conducted do not establish this
41. Michotte's 'paradoxical cases' may require further hedging (experiments 17, 70)
42. 'Visual acuity favours, at one and the same time, the segregation of the objects and the unification of movements with the objects performing them' (Michotte, p. 51)
43. J.K. Krushke and M.M. Fragassi, 'The Perception of Causality: Feature Binding in Interacting Objects', in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1996), pp. 441-6
44. E. Spelke, 'Principles of Object Perception', Cognitive Science, 14 (1990), pp. 49-50
45. See also S. Carey and E. Spelke, 'Domain-Specific Knowledge and Conceptual Change', in L. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman (eds), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 169-200, at p. 175: 'A single system of knowledge ... appears to underlie object perception and physical reasoning'
46. R. Baillargeon, 'Infants' Physical Knowledge: of Acquired Expectations and Core Principles', in E. Dupoux (ed.), Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler (MIT Press, 2001), pp. 341-62
47. Su-hua Wang et al., 'Detecting Continuity Violations in Infancy: a New Account and New Evidence from Covering and Tube Events', Cognition, 95 (2005), pp. 129-73
48. The evidence on this point is controversial. Sekuler and colleagues show that when subjects observe an ambiguous visual display consistent with either a collision or a passing event, the timing of a tone can control whether subjects report seeing a collision or passing, and argue that this is a multisensory phenomenon: R. Sekuler et al., 'Sound Alters Visual Motion Perception', Nature, 385 (1997), p. 308
49. Watanabe and Shimojo extend this finding by showing that not any event (or non-event) which draws attention at the moment of a collision will disambiguate the display; they argue that the tone's effect on the perception of a collision is a 'genuine audiovisual effect, not an audiovisual effect that results from auditory effects': K. Watanabe and S. Shimojo, 'When Sound Affects Vision: Effects of Auditory Grouping on Visual Motion Perception', Psychological Science, 12 (2001), pp. 109-16
50. Guski and Troje, on the other hand, show that features which carry no information about causation, such as a blink, can also influence whether subjects report seeing a collision or a passing. These authors conclude that auditory influences on the perceptual of collisions are 'no true cross-modal phenomenon': R. Guski and N.F. Troje, 'Audiovisual Phenomenal Causality', Perception and Psychophysics, 65 (2003), pp. 789-800, at p. 799
51. M.G.F. Martin, 'Perception, Concepts and Memory', Philosophical Review, 101 (1992), pp. 745-63, at p. 761: 'Perception and experience ... are a matter of the world making itself apparent to us'
52. 'Describing [Mary's experience] as being as of a dodecahedron ... is ... normally intended to describe its introspectable character, that it is of how the physical world appears to be' (Martin, p. 762)
53. There is a short review in J.L. Anthony and CJ. Lonigan, 'The Nature of Phonological Awareness: Converging Evidence from Four Studies of Preschool and Early Grade School Children', Journal of Educational Psychology, 96 (2004), pp. 53-5
54. While children typically pass different tests for phoneme awareness at slightly different times, they are collectively taken to measure phonological awareness because longitudinal surveys have shown that success or failure on these tasks is best explained by a single factor: see J.L. Anthony and DJ. Francis, 'Development of Phonological Awareness', Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 (2005), pp. 255-9, at p. 256
55. Eimas and colleagues trained infants to suck in order to hear a sound and were then able to identify infants' interest in different sounds by measuring how vigorously they suck in order to hear the next sound. Since novel sounds are more interesting than familiar sounds, this experiment reveals which sounds infants regard as different and which they treat as the same. The headline finding is that four-month-olds have categorical perception of some phonemes: P.D. Eimas et al., 'Speech Perception in Infants', Science, 171 (1970, pp. 303-6
56. Further research established that infants perceive many phonemes much as adults do. See P. Jusczyk, 'Language Acquisition: Speech Sounds and the Beginning of Phonology', in J. Miller et al. (eds), Speech, Language and Communication (San Diego: Academic Press, 1995), pp. 263-301, at p. 267: 'from a very early age, infants discriminate many, if not all, of the contrasts that are likely to occur among words in the native language. Moreover, at least on a general level, there are some striking similarities between the way that infants and adults respond to the same kinds of speech contrasts.'
57. This was first noted by I.Y. Liberman et al., 'Explicit Syllable and Phoneme Segmentation in the Young Child', Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18 (1974), pp. 201-12, at p. 203: 'it does not follow from the fact that a child can easily distinguish bud from bat that he can therefore respond analytically to the phonemic structure that underlies the distinction'
58. Some of the first experiments with infants appear in A. Leslie and S. Keeble, 'Do Six-Month-Old Infants Perceive Causality?', Cognition, 25 (1987), pp. 265-88
59. L.M. Oakes and L.B. Cohen, 'Infant Perception of a Causal Event', Cognitive Development, 5 (1990), pp. 193-207
60. For more recent surveys see L.B. Cohen et al., 'The Development of Infant Causal Perception', in A. Slater (ed.), Perceptual Development: Visual, Auditory, and Speech Perception in Infancy (Hove: Psychology Press, 1998), pp. 167-210
61. Saxe and Carey, 'The Perception of Causality in Infancy'
62. See, e.g., N.E. Berthier et al., 'Where's the Ball? Two- and Three-Year-Olds Reason about Unseen Events', Developmental Psychology, 36 (2000), pp. 394-401
63. Bruce Hood and colleagues directly contrasted causal tasks requiring perceptual responses with parallel tasks requiring simple reasoning: B. Hood et al., 'Looking and Search Measures of Object Knowledge in Preschool Children', Developmental Psychology, 39 (2003), pp. 61-70
64. A. Schlottmann et al., 'Perceptual Causality in Children', Child Development, 73 (2002), pp. 1656-77, at p. 1671
65. A. Schlottmann, 'Perception Versus Knowledge of Cause and Effect in Children: When Seeing Is Believing', Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10 (2001), pp. 111-15
66. and 'Seeing it Happen and Knowing How it Works: How Children Understand the Relation between Perceptual Causality and Underlying Mechanism', Developmental Psychology, 35 (1999), pp. 303-17
67. M. Haith, 'Who Put the Cog in Infant Cognition? Is Rich Interpretation Too Costly?', Infant Behaviour and Development, 21 (1998), pp. 167-79
68. R. Keen, 'Representation of Objects and Events: Why Do Infants Look So Smart and Toddlers Look So Dumb?', Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12 (2003), pp. 79-83
69. This claim is made by Michotte, pp. 270-1, Ducasse, 'Causation: Perceivable? Or Only Inferred?', p. 177, and Armstrong, 'Going through the Open Door Again'
70. Dretske, 'Simple Seeing', in his Perception, Knowledge and Belief (Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 112
71. Christoph Hoerl supported every stage of this research: without his input I could not have done it. Thanks for leads, discussion and opposition to Keith Allen, Ian Apperly, Helen Beebee, Bill Brewer, Naomi Eilan, Hemdat Lerman, Guy Longworth, Fiona Macpherson, Tony Marcel, John Mollon, Louise Richardson, Jonny Roberts, Liz Robinson, Johannes Roessler, Anne Schlottmann, Brian Scholl, Nick Shea, David Sobel, Matt Soteriou, Helen Steward, Toni Tochel and an anonymous referee. I am also grateful for discussion at the Admissible Contents of Experience conference organized by Glasgow University's Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, York University, London Institute of Education, a Metaphysics of Science Workshop at Nottingham University, a Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture at Bradford University, a European Society of Philosophy and Psychology meeting at Lund University, and the 'Dispositions & Causes Workshop' at Bristol University